Hello, my name is Kristen Virag, and I am very pleased to be the co-author of the Mental Health for the Digital Generation blog. I have had two major episodes of anxiety, depression and depersonalization (where your thoughts and feelings feel like you’re not your own and you lose your own identity) which left me in a very crippled state for several months. I now consider myself recovered, but I pay special attention to myself and care for myself daily to make sure I never relapse.

It’s important to keep calm when others put you down and that means staying level headed and reacting in a healthy way. Being put down by others can trigger self-esteem issues and cause emotional distress, if you allow it. The reality is that there will be people who put you down. Most people experience put downs at some point; and these can come from anyone including family members, peers, bullies or even strangers. The good news is that you can learn to keep calm and cope better when others put you down.

Learning the practice of presence will help you live your best life. The practice of presence helps you enjoy your life as you live it and keeps you from getting sucked in to the pursuit of perfection.

People with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder deal with stigma every day, but they have to deal with ableism as well. Ableism assumes that everyone functions at the normative capacity; and that’s just not true, including for people with a mental illness. For example, a facility without a ramp for people who are in wheelchairs would be a place of ableism. Ableism can also mean teasing someone with schizophrenia about leaving a party early. But self-inflicted ableism and schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder can be the worst stigma of all.

It’s easy to overlook hydration when you have binge eating disorder. It’s easy to overlook it when you don’t have binge eating disorder. However, hydration should be an important thing for everyone, especially when you have binge eating disorder as dehydration can lead to overeating.

Do you need help finding a reason to live if you have a mental illness? For a long time I did. In spite of having a good treatment team, I just couldn’t snap out of my depressive funks. I was frequently suicidal. Then I found my reason to live. Finding a reason to live when you have a mental illness can be just as vital to your treatment as finding the right medication and finding the right therapist.

If you use dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills to communicate with confidence you will notice incredible changes. Who doesn’t want to feel more in control and confident before entering a conversation, especially if there is some tension between you and the other person? This new DBT skill is one of the best skills I’ve come across to help you confident before you say a word. The video will help you use DBT skills to communicate with confidence.

The definition of mental illness recovery is a “return to a normal state of health, mind or strength. To regain possession or control of something stolen or lost.” For me, and for others suffering with a mental illness, the loosely named “recovery” is the ultimate goal. To integrate back into normality, to regain the possession of broken faculties, to retrieve the logical mind that has somehow been lost. That is mental illness recovery.

Biological markers for combat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are being found more and more today, so anyone that says it’s “all in your head” really needs to give theirs a shake. What we know today is that there are significant, biological differences between those who suffer from combat PTSD and those who don’t. These biological markers for combat PTSD may allow clinicians in the future to easily and correctly diagnose veterans with PTSD and even predict who is likely to get combat PTSD if they enter a combat zone.